TORCS IN EARLY HISTORIC SCOTLAND

Summary Torcs are a prominent element in the Gododdin poem from Early Historic Scotland. This is intriguing as the archaeological evidence for torcs is much earlier. Examination of references to torcs in the poem shows that they were important status symbols worn by the entire war band. Archaeological evidence shows that gold torcs were worn in this area during the Iron Age, and in the early Roman period torcs occur on both native and Roman military sites. Some examples on Roman sites seem to be linked to the ala Petriana, an elite cavalry unit. As the poem is concerned with another elite cavalry group whose ancestors interacted with the ala Petriana the poetic prominence of torcs was probably influenced by this. Sculptural and hoard evidence confirms the use of torcs in Early Historic Scotland and reinforces both the idea of Roman influence and the link with cavalry.     

CLASS OR COMMUNITY? MARX,THE RUSSIAN COMMUNE,AND CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY

This article explores the relationship between class and community through a discussion of peasant struggles and the commune during the Russian Revolution. Doing so, we show how Marx's class‐oriented reflections on community can help us to understand the role that the peasantry plays (or should play) in processes of social transformation. This enables us, first, to understand the relevance of communal forms for Marx, who believed that communitarian ways of life were crucial for overcoming a value‐based society. It is, in fact, a mistake to divide Marx's intellectual trajectory into two periods: a categorical Marx, who authored Capital and critically analyzed the classical theory of value, and a phenomenological, empirical Marx, who in the last years of his life abandoned writing Capital and focused instead on studying the Russian peasantry. Second, it enables us to discuss new externalist visions, such as postcolonial and decolonial theories, which postulate that the subordination of contemporary peasant communities is rooted in epistemology, culture, and local power relations. These theories are related to the old social‐democratic canon, which conceives of social classes as preconstituted entities and of capital as a parasitic externality that is incommensurable with social dynamics. The experience of the Russian peasantry calls into question all externalist and ontological perspectives.     

Oliver O'Donovan's Critique of Autonomy

Abstract

More than any other contemporary theologian, Oliver O'Donovan has revived political theology as a field of enquiry. Yet O'Donovan has been consistent in his critique of the modern idea of autonomy, judging it to be at odds with the more communitarian idea of covenanted community found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. He contrasts this modern idea, and its political implications, with the older biblical idea, also adding some basic points from Aristotle's idea of the polis. But unlike many contemporary communitarians, O'Donovan is also able to incorporate the idea of human rights into his political theology. He sees this supposedly modern idea having fuller precedence in the biblical idea of mishpat ("justice"), which he takes to be God's primordial claim on His covenanted community, a claim that sufficiently grounds both individual rights and communal rights and which enables them to function together. However, O'Donovan draws the line when it comes to the modern social contract theory, arguing that it is at odds with biblical teaching that the primary responsibility of rulers is to divine law. While agreeing with O'Donovan's rejection of autonomy and his acceptance of human rights, this paper argues against O'Donovan's theological rejection of social contract theory. Instead, it argues that a social contract is consistent with the doctrine of the covenant; indeed that the very possibility of the social contract is best explained by the doctrine of the covenant, and that this acceptance of the social contract serves the best political interests of covenanted communities (like the Jewish People and the Christian Church) in an otherwise secular world.     

Memorial soliloquies in post-colonial Rhodes and the ghost of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism

This paper is based on a close reading of Greek and Rodesli (Rhodian Jewish) narratives focusing on the time when Rhodes was under Italian (1912–1943) and then German (1943–1945) rule, the last period when religiously diverse communities coexisted in the island. While Greek historiography seeks to vindicate the island’s final integration into the Greek national space, Rodesli memory is meant to preserve the heritage of a community destroyed by the Nazis. Notably, these corpuses make no references to one another. This phenomenon of soliloquy, the article argues, is illustrative of a competitive memory characteristic of recollections of the past in the eastern Mediterranean and challenges nostalgic invocations of a pre-national, “cosmopolitan” Mediterranean. Broadening the discussion to other post-Ottoman settings, the article draws attention to property redistribution in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing as a major factor in the separation of memory along communal lines. Noting the omnipresence of the figure of the “ghost” in the literature on the region, the paper finally explores the heuristic potential of hauntology to conceive histories of the region that would be inclusive and yet attentive to the differences in the nature, purpose and reciprocal indifference of the sources and of the asymmetrical relations of power in which they were produced.     

The Military of Qajar Iran: The Features of an Irregular Army from the Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century

The article examines the parameters of the irregular army in Qajar Iran, including its assembly, numbers, and provisions, as well as the army's organizational structure: its administration and the divisions of the ad hoc forces (provincial militia and tribal cavalry) and of the standing forces (the shah's bodyguard and artillery corps). Until the creation of the so-called regular army units in Iran at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the irregular army was regarded as the only military force in the service of the Qajar dynasty. Despite the existence of a “regular army,” irregular forces, particularly tribal cavalry, continued to play a significant role in Iran's military system throughout the nineteenth century. By understanding the features of the irregular army—its role in Qajar society, its organizational and social structures, its ethnic composition, and other characteristics—we can better understand the character of the state itself.     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.     

Mortuary Variability and Status Differentiation in the Late Jomon of Hokkaido Based on the Analysis of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Shuteibo</Emphasis> (Communal Cemeteries)

The shuteibo, a type of communal cemetery characterized by a circular embankment, was constructed in the latter half of the Late Jomon (c. 1520 cal BC–1250 cal BC) in Hokkaido, Japan. Shuteibo at the Kiusu, Misawa-1, Bibi-4 and Kashiwagi-B sites are key to understanding the complex hunter-gatherer societies of the Late Jomon. Elite graves inside the shuteibo and non-elite graves outside them show clear differences in terms of grave goods, red ocher and grave markers at Kiusu-4. These communal cemeteries may have been created and maintained by elites who had access to highly valued materials, such as jadeite, through long-distance trade. Differences in the number of graves and grave goods among shuteibo at the Misawa-1 and Bibi-4 sites indicate differences in group size and intra-site elite differentiation. The Kiusu site has both the largest example and the largest concentration of these cemeteries in Hokkaido. At the inter-site level, differences in the size of these communal cemeteries indicate variability in the number of corporate groups as well as in relative power between sites.     

Spiritual Warfare in Machiavelli's Prince

Machiavelli uses metaphors to convey meaning beyond the surface of his text. Access to his metaphors often begins via his “mistakes,” such as his calling (in chapter 12 of the Prince) Philip II of Macedon a “mercenary,” when in fact Philip was no such thing. This article focuses on chapters 12–14 of The Prince and explores the metaphoric meanings of Machiavelli's four types of soldiers—mercenary, auxiliary, mixed, and one's own—to explicate Machiavelli's account of how the mind of the West was conquered via “spiritual warfare.” It then explains Machiavelli's strategy for re-conquest by a new spiritual army trained by Machiavelli that will fight to defeat the regnant spiritual power and further Machiavelli's new principles.     

Reading Margaret Oliphant

Margaret Oliphant's fiction has been steadily undergoing critical reassessment since the 1990s. The advent of the Selected Works from Pickering & Chatto testifies to the growing significance of this great novelist within the scholarly community. The inquiries of several researchers, especially Elisabeth Jay and Joanne Shattock, have transformed our understanding of this prolific author's achievements. Yet the larger proportion of Oliphant's novels await the critical attention they deserve. The present discussion focuses on the main reasons why her seemingly minor works of prose fiction possess a psychological understanding that is as great as that which we find in her more famous narratives, such as Miss Marjoribanks (1866). The recognition of divided minds, of the games the mind plays, and her dramatization of them, is part of what gives her novels power that general critiques of her work often miss. This point becomes clear when we broaden our perspective on Oliphant's novels beyond the six fictions that comprise her Chronicles of Carlingford (1862–76). Here the analysis concentrates on The Ladies Lindores (1883) and, more expansively, the little-known For Love and Life (1874).     

Guerrilla healthcare innovation: creative resilience in Zimbabwe’s chimurenga, 1971–1980

Abstract

Drawing from the last five years of chimurenga, Zimbabwe’s war of self-liberation from the early 1960s to 1980s, this paper shows that the most important aspect of technology and innovation in Africa is not the technology and innovation itself, but the African spirit of creative resilience born of the specificities of struggles its people have endured. By creative resilience is meant a phenomenon whereby, even where death is the outcome, and where the situation is insurmountable, people do not just surrender to fate, but die fighting. As a site of creative resilience, chimurenga is the ultimate site of creative labor and a vast laboratory, not simply a destination for incoming technologies, or a 'user' space but generative of its own insurgent and counter-insurgent innovations. Focusing on the communal war effort involving guerrillas and ordinary Africans in the rear bases of Mozambique and Zambia and on the front inside Zimbabwe, the paper makes its argument through a focus on healthcare innovation.     

Vattel's theory of the international order: Commerce and the balance of power in the Law of Nations

Vattel's Law of Nations (1758) claimed that a system of independent states could maintain the liberty of each without undermining the ideal of an international society. The chief institution serving this purpose was the balance of power. In Vattel's account, the balance of power could be stabilized if it operated primarily through a process of commercial preferences and restrictions. These limits on how states ought to defend themselves were grounded in Vattel's thoroughly forgotten writings on the mid-eighteenth-century luxury debates, which addressed the political economy of reforming the state and pacifying the international order. An examination of Vattel's Law of Nations in this context shows that his approach to the law of nations should not be dismissed as a capitulation to the harsh reality of international politics.     

Marina Lewycka,A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Abstract

Jim Wallis's The Call to Conversion features an apocalyptic theological imagination with an ecclesiological focus. The church is entrusted with the communal mission of making visible the intrusion of the reign of God in Jesus Christ. The thesis of this essay is that The Call to Conversion is a better resource for Christian political engagement than Wallis's more recent book, God's Politics, which is characterized by a turn toward a "public church" social ethic. The accent has shifted to the formation of a larger political movement seeking social change primarily through congressional lobbying. Wallis's error is the extent to which he has pinned his hopes on the institutions of American democracy. The Call to Conversion helps us recover an account of political engagement flowing from local ecclesial witness. Sheldon Wolin, Romand Coles, and other political theorists, provide support for approaches to political engagement that begin with local struggles for justice.     

Redescribing the Enlightenment: The German-Jewish adoption of Bildung as a counter-normative ideal

This essay offers a reconsideration of the ethical vocabulary, social possibilities and religious worldview enabled by the German concept of Bildung, or human self-cultivation, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by German Jews in the late eighteenth century. By examining the creative use of the concept by German Jewish philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and, later, in a very different political context, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the article challenges a body of scholarship that interprets the German Jewish enthusiasm for Bildung as an assimilationist capitulation by post-emancipation German Jews to the individualism and rationalism of the German Enlightenment. In contrast, I suggest that both Mendelssohn and Cassirer saw Bildung's emphasis on the vita activa as offering a vehicle for multifarious human engagement with the world that inspired not only a movement beyond reified conceptions of tradition, whether religious or secular, but forms of activism that could combine cosmopolitan sympathies with communal affiliation.     

The making of a minor saint in Drogo of Saint‐Winnoc's Historia translationis s. Lewinnae

In 1058, the Flemish abbey of Saint‐Winnoc stole St Lewinna's relics from a minster in southern England. The community worked to establish her cult in Flanders. Although scholars have focused on the material gain Saint‐Winnoc probably hoped the cult would bring, this article argues that the development of the abbey's communal identity figured more prominently in its motives. The community saw Lewinna primarily as a means to help bolster its bid for independence from its mother house.     

The importance of communal forests in carbon storage: Using and destabilizing carbon measurement in understanding Guatemala's payments for ecosystem services

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are a conservation initiative that offer payments to people who own or manage lands that provide desired ecosystem services. Utilizing mixed methods, I examine how PES in the form of government-issued forestry incentives interact with land tenure to affect carbon storage in Guatemala's Western Highlands. Land tenure is a larger determining factor for carbon storage than payments, as communal forests managed by Indigenous Maya K'iche' communities have significantly higher carbon stocks than private landholdings in these same communities. No statistically significant differences were found in carbon stocks between incentivized and non-incentivized plots, and participants enrolled only a fraction of their land, likely prioritizing enrollment of degraded plots. These results indicate the importance of using both social and physical science methods to understand the physical outcomes and social context of forest management. I also reflect on why carbon storage is often prioritized, drawing on a critical physical geography framework to analyze carbon accounting methods. Measuring carbon storage gives us the tools to describe the success of communal forest management, yet I also caution relying on the quantification of ecosystem services as a method for landscape valuation and suggest avoiding prioritizing carbon storage and sequestration.     

Determinisme et liberte: Approche d'une histoire du conditionnement: La peur de souffrir

The article takes issue with W. G. Runciman's contention, in Great Books, Bad Arguments, that modern political development has moved beyond both theory and practice of governance by a sovereign power over subjects as expounded in Hobbes's Leviathan. Runciman's allegations that Hobbes overrates education, that he fails to recognise the potential for dissent and revolt in a polity under a sovereign, and that he ignores society's pre-political scope and its post-absolutist, eventually democratic prospects, are checked against the text and argument of Leviathan. Runciman's contention that government without subjection has been achieved in modern constitutions is confronted with Hobbes's resistance.     

Cooper v. Aaron (1958): A Hidden Story of Unanimity and Division

Contemporary and later commentators emphasized the Supreme Court's forceful affirmation of its own authority in Cooper v. Aaron (1958). The case was the Court's first significant test of states' rights opposition denying that Brown v. Board of Education (1954) (Brown I) and the Brown II (1955) decree permitting gradual implementation were legitimate constitutional law. Indeed, following the Court's announcement of Cooper v. Aaron in September 1958, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus and his followers closed the very same Little Rock schools the Supreme Court had ordered desegregated. Black students' rights did not prevail until summer 1959. In Arkansas and elsewhere, defiance initially triumphed over the Supreme Court's self‐assertive power. ¹     

Renegotiating Barbuda's commons: recent changes in Barbudan open-range cattle herding

Barbuda remains little developed and sparsely populated relative to its neighbors in the Leeward Lesser Antilles, a rather extraordinary and relatively unknown Caribbean place. Much of its distinctiveness derives from the communal land-tenure system, itself rooted in three centuries of open-range cattle herding. Yet, as revealed through interviews, newspaper archives, and landscape observations, open-range cattle herding has declined over the past three decades, with related changes in land tenure. As the new Barbuda Land Act came into effect in 2008, codifying the communal tenure system, the very landscape elements that manifest open-range herding have become obscure. In particular, the rock-walled stockwells have become largely defunct, many of the walls lie in ruins or have been entirely consumed by the crusher that converted them into gravel to surface roads. With the principal land use that had supported communal control largely out of practice, usufruct access to land now largely obsolete, the new act might have little actual impact in preserving Barbuda's uniqueness.     

Catholic resistance theory: William Barclay versus Jean Boucher

ABSTRACT

This article examines William Barclay's response to Jean Boucher's De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii (1589) in view of the complexities of Catholic political thought in this post-Tridentine period. It argues that Barclay's famous category of ‘monarchomach’ is problematic for its avoidance of the issue of confessional difference, and that on questions of the relationship between the respublica and the ecclesia Barclay struggled to find an adequate response to Boucher in his De Regno et Regali Potestate (1600). His De Potestate Papae (1609) is treated as the intellectual extension of his battle with Boucher, and more broadly his confrontation with the position of the Catholic League and Jesuits on indirect papal power. By considering Barclay's works in the context of French Gallicanism and the Catholic League in the French Wars of Religion, this discussion aims to reposition Barclay in relation to other Catholic political theorists and thereby re-evaluate the category of Catholic resistance theory.     

On the current absence and future improbability of political Catholicism in Italy

Clerical ‘non-negotiable values’ were actively promoted by right-wing governments in the 2000s, the Monti government that replaced them was strongly supported by the Vatican and the Italian bishops, and the current left-wing government is led by a former member of the Catholic popolari who attends Mass every Sunday. But this article argues that, rather than a new golden age of political Catholicism, the return of Catholicism to Italian politics has taken a ‘low intensity’ form which lacks the robust combination of ideas, leaders, organizations, and interests that informed earlier, genuinely political forms of Catholic engagement. The article demonstrates this by focusing on the ‘Todi movement’, which played a crucial role in the Monti government, and on Matteo Renzi’s current leadership of the Partito democratico and the national government. It also proposes a theoretical framework to explain the apparent contradiction between the high visibility and the low political relevance of Catholicism in Italian politics.